Visitors
| Before reading from his latest novel, The Darling,
Russell Banks told an audience at the Kelly Writers House that he
was still kind of tinkering with the prose. Banks fans
might find scant space for improvement in such characterizations as:
Shes a drug-free, home-schooled, vegan virgin from Vermont,
childlike and winsome on the surface, but on the inside tight as a
fist. The writer, however, admitted that he never felt he had
a great fluency or natural gift. I think partially because of
my Protestant working-class New England background, I mistrusted
language and felt inept and inadequate [around it].

What the author of Cloudsplitter, Rule of the Bone,The Sweet Hereafter, and Affliction does possess is
a great yearning to try to make my stories connect to the larger
world, to the larger issues that concern me personally, he said.
And so I found that essentially the only way I could overcome my
own lack of fluency, my own intellectual ineptitude, is to trust the
process, the process of writing.

One of three Writers House Fellows for 2004 (along with Lyn Hejinian
and James Alan McPherson), Banks spent two days here in February,
sharing within these intimate quarters how the process works for
him. In addition to his evening readingfrom a novel set partly in
Liberia and partly on the upstate New York farm of a former sixties
activisthe met with undergraduates taking the Writers House Fellows
Seminar. The next morning he took part in a brunch and question-and-answer
session moderated by Writers House faculty master Al Filreis.

Among other topics, he talked about truth and fact in historical fiction.
Anything I read in the newspapers, anything told to me in a bar by
a drunk, or even a sober person anything I dream, to me all
of this exists on the same plane of availability for fiction, he
said. The main question for me with regard to using historical material
is plausibility.

In writing Cloudsplitter, based on abolitionist John Brown,
Banks kept the main facts in order while changing a few details that
werent part of the general publics knowledge. This drew
the ire of some historians.

There
was an early passage in the novel when Browns family goes up
into the Adirondacks and crosses along the Cascade lakes, which are
described as shaped like a scimitar. I wanted the image in there because
its a huge event later in the book when they use swords to butcher
pro-slavery families in Kansas. [The local historian] calls me up.
Her name was Ms. McKenzie.

She
said, The road didnt go there in 1848.

I
said, I know.

She
said, You know? But that road didnt go there in 1848.

And
I said, I dont care, Ms. McKenzie.

Most authors do care, however, about creating realistic characters.
Banks seemed touched when one reader at the session told him, Your
characters seem so real, and I was wondering if you feel theres
a future for your characters outside of your books.

Yes. Sometimes I like to think theyre all living in a
commune in New Hampshire, a really dysfunctional place, he joked.
It is true that certain characters in my mind live ontheyre
the young ones [whose] destinies havent been worked out yet.
I dont think Ill ever revisit them and find out [what
happened], but I do miss them.S.F.